The Rise of the Forgotten Fang
PROLOGUE — The Wolf Raised by Turtles
A lost young wolf once met an even younger monkey in a desert land.
The wolf roamed alone — dust in his fur, hunger in his bones, teeth bared at a world that never once bared its throat back. He lived off scraps and stolen water, darting between bone-dry rocks and skeletons of dead trees. The sun turned the sand into knives, and still he walked.
Then he saw him.
A monkey boy, tiny but impossible, standing in the middle of the desert like the heat didn’t exist. Bare feet in cracked earth. Tail swaying lazily behind him. Eyes bright, stupidly bright — like someone who had never been taught what fear was.
The wolf attacked.
They clashed. Desert wind howled around them as fists met claws, kicks cracked stone, and shockwaves chased vultures from the sky. The monkey laughed while he fought, the sound infuriating, pure. The wolf snarled. The clash felt endless.
Until she appeared.
A blue bunny.
She dropped out of the sky in a whining metal beast with wheels and glass and noise, her hair the same shade of blue as the sky at dawn. She stood between them, small but unafraid, shouting at the wolf, scolding the monkey, as if either one of them were normal.
She saved the monkey — pulled him back from the wolf’s fangs without a second thought.
The wolf froze.
He’d seen prey before. But not like this. Not brave and fragile and furious all at once. The desert wind went quiet in his ears. The heat, the hunger, the fight — all swallowed by something else.
So the wolf did the only thing that made sense in that impossible moment.
He followed her.
He followed the blue bunny into cities and mountains and across the sea. Followed her into chaos and laughter and a thousand near-deaths. Somewhere in that madness they met a turtle — a very old man who wore a shell on his back and smiled like he’d seen the end of the world and decided it was funny.
Under the turtle’s guidance, the monkey and the wolf learned to move like water and strike like storms. They learned patience, discipline, and how to turn their wildness into something sharper.
The monkey prince grew stronger. His power rose with every battle. His heart never darkened.
The bunny changed too. She stopped running from how she felt and loved the monkey prince openly, even when he flew past the sky and into the stars.
But the wolf…
The wolf suffered.
He twisted himself into something he thought the turtle would approve of. He wore discipline like a shell. He bit down on his instincts until they bled. He laughed off his failures. He died — over and over again — and every revival came with more humiliation.
He forgot he was a wolf at all.
He believed he was just another turtle.
Every time the world needed a hero, the monkey prince rose. The wolf watched, clapped, cheered, hid.
The story should have ended in a crater — his body torn open by a green, writhing creature, his death turned into a joke across a thousand worlds.
The weakest to die from a green bean.
But that was not where his story ended.
It was where it finally began.
CHAPTER ONE — The Puppet Stage
Time passed.
The monkey continued his journey, defeating foes stronger than himself, turning enemies into allies. The blue bunny stayed at his side, orbiting his impossible gravity. The turtle faded into legend.
Somewhere in the spaces between battles, a theater appeared.
The stage was full of puppets — wooden limbs, painted faces, strings that glimmered like spider silk in stage light. They reenacted a legend: a wolf in the desert, a monkey, a bunny, a turtle. It was all there, turned into theater. Tragedy sanded down into something that could be clapped at.
In the darkened audience sat a lone figure.
Yamcha.
His eyes were open, but it felt like he was asleep. His body was somewhere else, broken and bandaged, lying on a cot beneath fluorescent lights in some hospital on Earth. But his mind — his mind drifted here, in this place of wood and string and mocking echoes.
Onstage, the wolf puppet chased the monkey. The blue bunny intervened. The turtle appeared, slow and wise. They trained. They laughed. The wolf fell. Again. Again.
The audience of shadows chuckled at all the right moments.
Yamcha’s jaw tightened.
Then the lead puppet turned.
Its movements stopped. The strings went slack but it didn’t fall. The air thickened, heavy as ocean water.
In a voice deeper than anything the stage had produced before, the puppet spoke:
“This is your life.
Does it sound familiar, Yamcha?”
The stage trembled.
One by one, the other puppets collapsed. Their strings severed by an unseen hand. The blue bunny puppet fell beside the monkey prince, her painted eyes staring up emptily. The monkey’s legs cracked on impact. The turtle vanished completely, as if he had never existed.
The stage became a graveyard of broken roles.
Yamcha couldn’t move. He couldn’t look away.
The darkness above the stage pulsed like a living thing.
“What’s about it, dear wolf?”
The voice echoed, colder now.
“Raised by turtles?”
The words hit harder than any Ki blast.
Raised by turtles.
The wolf in him flinched. The bandit from the desert. The kid who’d once been strong enough to scare whole villages. Had he really let that part of himself be buried under jokes and training routines and someone else’s philosophy?
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The darkness chuckled.
“I’m hungry for entertainment, little cub.
And you were disappointing.
Your weakness so glaring, you’re laughable.
My descent made a meme online — your pose, your everything.
The weakest to die from a green bean.”
Images crashed through him like falling stars.
The Saibaman clinging to him.
The explosion.
His body, crumpled in that perfect, photogenic way. The pose that the internet loved. That the universe loved. The punchline.
Green bean.
His nickname in a million threads. Clips looping his death. People laughing.
The stage warped. The puppets bled color, faces smearing. The shadows in the seats leaned closer, their features dissolving into mocking blurs.
And at the center of it all stood Yamcha.
Not the desert bandit.
Not the Turtle School student.
Not the joke.
Just… the one everyone laughed at.
The wolf inside him howled, but no sound came out. Not here. Not in this place built from humiliation.
“Weakest to die from a green bean,”
the voice repeated, savoring every syllable.
The lights went out.
The theater vanished.
Yamcha sat in absolute darkness, the echo of that line burned into his bones.
For a long, breathless moment, there was nothing.
Then something new.
A warmth.
Not the warmth of the sun, or ki, or blood. It felt older. Larger. Like the gentle heat that seeps from the universe itself.
A second voice entered the dark. This one wasn’t mocking. It was ancient. Tired. Kind.
“That’s right, my child,” it said softly.
“You were born for far more than this mortal scale.”
Yamcha’s breath hitched.
Far more than this mortal scale.
The mockery, the memes, the failures — they all flickered in his mind like static and then began to fall away, one frame at a time.
“My stay here has been too long, and rules are rules,”
the voice continued.
“The old man from the Apella Zone only lets me judge my kin, no others.
And I was awakened just for this moment.
Let’s begin.”
The darkness peeled back.
Light poured in — not blinding, but endless. An expanse of white, stretching in every direction, where gravity was just a suggestion and time… time felt optional.
Yamcha stood.
His body looked the same.
Orange gi. Scars. Hair tied back in a low tail. No halo. No blood. Just him.
No audience.
No stage.
Just the voice.
“You’ve lived your life in the shadows of others,” it said.
“You’ve worn their expectations like a mask.
But what if you could take that mask off?”
A weight that he hadn’t noticed until this moment suddenly made itself known. Heavy. Suffocating. The mask. The role. The idea that Yamcha was the joke, the benchwarmer, the warm-up act before the real fight.
What if he could break it?
“What if you could stand as yourself,”
the voice asked, closer now,
“no longer defined by their mockery, but by the truth of your own being?”
His chest ached.
Not from a blow. From something deeper.
He thought of Goku, standing in front of impossible enemies without a hint of doubt.
He thought of Vegeta, pride burning through defeat after defeat.
He thought of Krillin, dying and standing up, dying and standing up, over and over, and never stopping.
And then he thought of himself.
Running.
Hiding.
Laughing things off.
The light ahead of him shifted, condensing into a shape. It wasn’t human. It wasn’t animal. It was both. A towering silhouette of bone-white light and shadow-black fur. Long fangs. Eyes like molten moonlight.
A wolf.
“This is your moment of rebirth,”
the wolf said with the same ancient voice.
“No longer the wolf raised by turtles.
No longer the fool who dies from a green bean.
You are more. You always have been.”
Yamcha swallowed.
“Then show me,” he whispered. “If I’m more… show me.”
The wolf smiled.
And the world tilted.
